What Warren Buffett Would Tell You About Content Marketing
To paraphrase the Oracle of Omaha as if he were the Augur of Amplification, Buffett would probably offer two rules for those feeling leery about content marketing:
Rule #1: Never stop producing the best content you can.
Rule #2: Never forget rule #1.
Before you quit content marketing forever and relegate it to the wastebin of fad business trends, consider these key points:
Content Marketing is hard.
Content production is an investment wherein you may put in hours of time while getting relatively little results. Then one day the flywheel starts spinning, and all the small traffic gains start to multiply on themselves, coalescing into truly valuable traffic.
Many people optimize a few title tags and write a few blog posts and then sit around waiting for the money and leads to roll in. If it were that easy all your competition would have already done it, and the returns would be negligible.
Content Marketing is So Hard, Your Incompetent Competition Can’t Recreate It
Like any good diversification strategy, content marketing is hard for slow adopters to quickly copy and multiplies upon itself once it’s cemented in the minds of consumers. Like a new piece of factory floor equipment with significant up front costs but large payoffs once up and running, an internal content marketing machine can allow you to transcend your competition. Making your overall content strategy truly distinctive and set apart from the competition in the mind of consumers.
Furthermore a high quality content marketing machine isn’t easily replicated. The expertise it takes can’t be copied by drop shippers or fly by night operations. It takes true familiarity with a product and market knowledge to create great content.
Content Production Alone Isn’t Enough
Content production is nothing without a bigger investment across multiple channels, SEO, social, and digital PR. Simultaneously, if your site has horrendous technical SEO and offers a terrible experience to users, no amount of high quality content is going to ever contribute to significant revenue growth.
People Think Content Marketing Doesn’t Work… Because They Didn’t Work.
It is only through the practice of reaching out on social media, interacting with your user community, building relationships with journalists, and eventually becoming part of the news that you can succeed at content marketing.
The success of content marketing is really a result of crossing the threshold dose of marketing effort.
Produce Content Only When You Can Say You’ve Accomplished the Following:
- Addressed any technical issues on site
- Optimized for search engines (SEO 101)
- Identified and superseded the distinctiveness factors for your industry
- Improved user experience on-site
- Made conversions on-site effortless
Even though content marketing is a prolonged effort, it’s key to remember that it takes tenacity.
To quote Gary Vaynerchuck, yes the social media / hustle guru:
You’re always only one content post away from changing the course of your life.
This is a true summation of the content marketing landscape. So get out there and stay in the game. The attention of our end users and customers is the most valuable commodity we have access to as marketers and business owners – If you want to break free of paying for attention, content marketing and inbound is the most sustained way to do so.
Warren Buffet by Javier via Flikr
